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Review: Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift

Wish You Were Here begins and ends in the rain, with much wet weather and grey skies in between. This landscape of dampness provides a fitting backdrop for a novel about a car journey to recover and bury a soldier&rsquo;s body, but given that the story takes place in rural, coastal England (in November), it might be wise not to read too much into the bad weather.

Correction - November 4, 2014:
The previous version of this article included an incorrect photo credit. The accompanying photo of Graham Swift was taken by Ekko von Schwichow.

Wish You Were Here
begins and ends in the rain, with much wet weather and grey skies in between. This landscape of dampness provides a fitting backdrop for a novel about a car journey to recover and bury a soldier’s body, but given that the story takes place in rural, coastal England (in November), it might be wise not to read too much into the bad weather.

Graham Swift has written a funereal road trip novel before, the Booker Prize-winning
Last Orders
, which followed a group of World War II veterans to the British seaside to scatter the ashes of their dead mate.
Wish You Were Here
is a more somber and inward-looking work, and its cast of characters smaller and less gregarious.

That’s not always a good thing.

The action is seen largely through the eyes and memory of Jack Luxton, an ex-farmer in his early 40s who is watching an autumn storm through his bedroom window. Jack is brooding over a heated argument that just sent his wife Ellie out for a dangerous drive in the rain, but the loaded shotgun on the marriage bed loudly hints at more than just temporary marital discord.

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The reader is soon absorbed into Jack’s brooding memories. He and Ellie have been running a seaside holiday caravan park on the Isle of Wight since they both sold their respective family farms back in Devon. Jack’s memories are pierced by images of loss: the loss of his mother to cancer, the loss of the family’s beloved cattle to mad cow and hoof and mouth diseases, a loss that eventually drives his father to suicide and Jack to sell the farm.

The central figure of loss is Jack’s younger brother Tom, who escaped their brooding father’s influence the day he turned 18 and joined the army, where he became a sniper and was sent to Iraq. Jack has just returned from the mainland, where he accompanied Tom’s coffin from a military ceremony to the family plot near the Luxton farm, now owned by a yuppie banker who has converted it into a summer holiday home.

Jack’s memories are interspersed by Ellie’s own take on the past and present as she waits out the storm in her car, as well as a few chapters seen through the eyes of minor characters. This is very much Jack’s story and Jack’s version of his own story— which is both the novel’s greatest strength and weakness.

The problem is not so much that Jack is not particularly articulate or expressive but that the reader spends far too much time trapped in his closed world. Jack is literally alone in a dark bedroom for almost the full duration of the novel, where the events are slowly filtered through his reluctant, circuitous memories.

There is a lot of power in these early passages but little actual drama in the form of scenes and dialogue. In fact, the first full scene with dialogue (not paraphrased by Jack) doesn’t occur until page 92. If Jack—and Ellie for that matter—were more expressive and articulate this would be less of a problem, but as it is there are far too many passages of muddling internal monologue and free-floating emotional regret.

The reader is freed from much of that muddle when the story begins to focus on Jack’s memories of journeying to the mainland to bury Tom. Jack’s stolid emotional front is not fit for the task of playing the patriotic, public mourner and bearer of his brother’s body, and he is stricken by constant feelings of dislocation. Stepping from the military funeral reception for the grieving families and onto the tarmac where the soldiers’ coffins will be presented, Jack is overwhelmed:

“There was that reek of fuel and the sense that, after that crowded room, of being on the edge of something huge and remorseless. As if, though this was Oxfordshire, war was being waged only just over the skyline.”

Swift’s novels and stories have been chronicling a traditional but decidedly untrendy strain of Britishness for more than three decades.
Wish You Were Here
is a worthy addition to that body of work, but many readers may wish that Swift had shown the reader a little bit more of that uniquely British world than his grieving characters allow.

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